Really Getting Things Done

I have always been interested in efficiency and productivity especially with myself. As such, I like to take the time to customize anything I use a lot and find the optimal program for me (or as good as I can do).

As I get more responsibilities and things to remember, I really have fallen to my tools to help me keep going. Since my workflow was based upon one of my good friends and has only increased, I’d like to share what works for me and maybe some ideas that can help you no matter your place in life.

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Libraries, exceptions, and debugging

In some work I was doing with a ruby extension, state_machine. I ended up running into a very frustrating but simple problem with an exception I was receiving. I think this is a good opportunity to talk about exceptions especially with regard to libraries. If you just want the answer, you may want to look toward the end for the solution or how to debug these type of problem.

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Quicklook at Songbird

So I’ve actually been interested in the Songbird project for a long time. I have installed various versions and have always turned away for different reasons. One of my large problems is I have an extremely large music collection and have found that WinAmp deals with it approximately the best for features that I want versus being free and not too cumbersome. I really just want good searching on a large library and nice smart playlists (dynamic playlists) that support a lot of conditions without too much trouble. Features past that are nice to have but not needed.

The latest version (1.1.1) has a really nice interface and imported my library rather nicely. I was in the middle of listening to a podcast on iTunes on my Mac, so I didn’t play with it too much on my Windows install. So I installed Songbird on my Mac and asked it to grab my iTunes library (which is mostly podcasts I haven’t listened to and a little bit of music). It seemed ok with it though it didn’t grab my podcast subscriptions (which is annoying though not unexpected. So next step was to ask Songbird to subscribe to a podcast. It’s most definitively not the most intuitive thing in the world at this point as it only seems to support RSS or a single location (if I’m wrong, please correct me). It’s not that bad except it doesn’t seem to understand that a lot of podcasts are not something you want to keep. So podcast features could use to still improve.

What really struck me was the resources. So Songbird was just sitting idle now on my Intel Macbook and iTunes was currently playing back an mp3 podcast (mono but reasonable bitrate). Songbird was taking ~100MB of RAM just sitting there while iTunes used ~23MB to play back. Ouch. Even more surprising was that Songbird was taking between 8 and 10 percent of my cpu (again, doing nothing) while iTunes was taking about 4 percent while playing back. Again, ouch.

I don’t want to say Songbird is all bad by any means. It does seem to have a very nice installer and “assistant” for setting things up (like how Quicksilver does which I think is a very good system when done well). I’ll try to post a more detailed review after actually using it for music and maybe some music/web browsing after I do use it. It also is a good multiplatform mediaplayer. I just do believe at least the Mac client could use some more optimizations before I want it to take over for iTunes on my laptop that I like to try to optimize battery live anyway. If you want to play with a new media player, it’s definitely worth a look.

Version Control Comments and Rant

Version control is any sort of system for dealing with different points in an edit cycle of something. To narrow this post, I’m only really looking at formal version control systems (meaning a strategy of hand made zip files and email might work for you but won’t be discussed here). I’m also not going to claim to be anything of an expert on this topic and have merely had some experience with a small number of systems, so I’ll try to keep it short.
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Proposed Framework Comparison

I admit that I have not actually posted any of the comparisons of web development as was mentioned in my previous two posts. I apologize for this, but I have come up with what I find to be a reasonable means to actually compare them.

What better way is there for actually comparing the frameworks than to actually build a project in it? The problem with this is finding the time to actually do it. I figure a good place to start is to actually lay out the plan.
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PM meets dev: a bigger picture look at the web – Part 2

This is a continuation from Part 1. If you have not read that, I encourage you to read it first.

In my last post, we were looking at a large picture perspective of web applications. I first must apologize for a misuse of terminology. I used the terms “PM” and “Project Manager” when referring to the role being described in my last post. Strictly speaking that would be incorrect as just setting up premade software would not concern a PM in all likelihood. I should have just used the term “manager”.

As we continue, we are going to look at usability and maintainability. We are going to continue to approach these problems from the perspective of effort/time and decisions rather than technical aspects except where very useful.
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PM meets dev: a bigger picture look at the web – Part 1

I feel like it might be a good time to step back. This blog has existed for only a few years (going on 4), but it really has been enough time to see quite a bit change in the world of the internet. I maybe a dev in general, but I think a PM perspective is valuable especially from this perspective

I am by no means an expert on many topics including the ones I want to look at. I do argue that to be a feature in the regard that most of the world is not experts. Because of that, I can present a user’s perspective to a lot of topics.

I have wanted to see a wonderful and accessible web for a long time. From the client side, we have achieved that to a great degree. Browsers are actually overall acceptable products. I will not call them perfect by any means, but I do not think that a large concern of the web needs to be focused on the client. Instead I want to focus on the server side.
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Running Custom

Well, I have to say, my interests in running the latest and greatest software comes at a price.

I’ve taken to running svn releases of WordPress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.

For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.

Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.

Webtrends rant

Well, after abandoning my post for updating this for a while, I figure I might want to try Steve Yegge’s suggestion of being more opinionated in my blog. If nothing more, it might generate a bit of hate mail.

I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?

Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.

Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.

PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.

And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.

Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.

Drop off & Vim Tip

Besides just being a little lazy, I have had a few reasons for neglecting the site. Being on vacation recently is one of the larger ones, but generally it doesn’t matter. In disgust with how non-productive i’ve been, i’m going to start working on random stuff and little projects. Before I do that though, i’m going to try to get my Vim to be set up the way I like my editors.

For quite a while, i have struggled to find the perfect editor. I heard people praise various editors, but I have a big problem: I’m very multiplatformed. I run Ubuntu linux, windows xp, and windows vista on my main desktop and Mac OS X on my laptop. I like things to stay similar between them all so I can be consistent. My editor is one of the big things. This made something like TextMate hard to even look at. It’s supposed to be a great reasonably priced (40 euros) text editor for mac and mac only. Vim runs on pretty much everything. The problem is, I like to be able to see directory layouts, nice open buffer displays and a few other things that Vim isn’t nice for out of the box. I can live without them, but it’s not nearly as nice as I would like. Lucky for me, Alex Young wrote up instructions on how to enable the textmate like features in vim. I am excited and will be trying this as soon as I’m done here.

The end result is a cross platform, comfortable text editor for my coding needs. I would encourage you to look into it if you are looking for a cross platform solution or just want a really nice text editor. You will probably want a customized vimrc for everything you do as well. I’ll post mine after I get all this set up in it. It’s rather crazy (and mostly written by one of my friends, Saleem Abdulrasool).

UPDATE: Success! All the plugins are awesome and work exactly as they should. I uploaded my current vimrc. *nix wants it to be named .vimrc in your home directory and windows looks for _vimrc (i think) in the vim directory. If that doesn’t work (i’m more skeptical about windows; i haven’t used vim in windows for a while), check the vim documentation. View my vimrc at http://quad341.com/projects/vim.rc